Friday, January 15, 2010

THE OLD DARK ANACHRONISM

NOTE: THIS IS AN UNPLANNED ARTICLE, A BURST OF INSPIRATION, AND THEREFORE I DIDN’T HAVE A CHANCE TO ADD HYPERLINKS. I WILL INSERT LINKS AT A FUTURE DATE.

I’ve been thinking about this genre we love, the horror-comedy, and while always pondering the places it’s been (the whole reason for this project) the notion of where it is going or even where it is now intrigues me as well.

The classic horror-comedies being examined in the Scared Silly project fall into two categories: 1.) Famous (and not-so-famous) funny men (and sometimes women) get mixed up with real ghosts, monsters or other supernatural terrors (and sometimes gorillas and robots and mad scientists) and 2). Famous (and not-so-famous) funny men (and sometimes women) get mixed up with fake ghosts, monsters or other supernatural terrors (and sometimes gorillas and robots and mad scientists).

Within that framework there are several scenarios.

In the case of the “real” terrors, sometimes the comedy heroes are on an expedition in search of ancient artifacts (which usually ends up with them meeting a mummy or some similar indigenous folklore creatures), and sometimes the monsters or mad scientists kidnap our heroes and spirit them away to their castles or labs (usually to transplant their brains into monsters, gorillas or robots). Sometimes our heroes are in an old spooky house for one reason or another (usually due to the reading of a will and impending inheritance of the heirs involved) and they meet up with a real ghost.

When it comes to the fake terrors, most of the time our heroes are in an old, dark spooky house where real murders are being committed (usually impending heirs being bumped off one by one) but the perpetrators are blaming those murders on (trumped-up) ghosts or other supernatural forces. And sometimes the will requires the heroes to spend the night in the spooky house just to get the inheritance, and those holding the purse-strings are merely trying to scare said heirs away before they can claim that inheritance (a story device that had been repeated to death in 1950s through mid-1970s sitcoms as well as cartoons like Scooby Doo and its imitators).

So I’ve been thinking about this last scenario, the idea of the antagonists trying to “scare away” the protagonists, and I’ve been wondering if it could even reasonably be the premise for a modern-day movie - I mean in a pure, classic horror-comedy way where the most gruesome images on display and most risqué innuendos spoken are no more startling than the brief shock images and double-entendres found in 1963’s “The Raven” and 1966’s “The Ghost & Mr. Chicken.” But even more so, I’m wondering if the premise itself could even still be valid with a cast of characters who are supposed to exist in the “here and now” with present-day sensibilities. And I think the answer is “no.”

Think about it. First of all, who is even still gathering in old creaky mansions to hear wills read anymore? These transactions are usually done in lawyer’s offices. Sometimes the heir doesn’t even have to be there. So there’s the first convention that gets tossed out the window. But secondly, can a movie audience buy that the characters on the screen would actually believe in the “cheap scares” that the villains are foisting upon them? No. I believe the answer to that lies in the times – the times in which such stories initially flourished compared to the times in which they didn’t.

The classic “Old Dark House” horror-comedy-mysteries all tend to derive from the following sources: the 1913 novel “Seven Keys to Baldpate” (which formed the basis of several movies including the 1986 Gene Wilder/Gilda Radner horror-comedy “Haunted Honeymoon”) by Earl Derr Biggers (creator of Charlie Chan), the 1927 novel “Benighted” by J.B. Priestley (which yielded the 1932 classic movie “The Old Dark House” and the 1963 not-so-classic movie “The Old Dark House”), and the plays “The Bat” from 1920 by Mary Roberts Rinehart (filmed with Chester Morris as “The Bat Whispers” in 1926 and again in 1959 with its original title as a Vincent Price chiller), "The Cat & the Canary" from 1926 by John Willard (also made into several films including the classic 1939 Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard horror-comedy), and “The Gorilla” by Ralph Spence (filmed as a horror-comedy vehicle for The Ritz Brothers and inspiring the Hugh Herbert/Allen Jenkins horror-comedy, “Sh! The Octopus!”). All feature some combination of the familiar hallmarks of the genre – hidden passageways, suspicious servants, old creaky houses, etc. And all contain a lot of humor. Coming a little late to the party but adding the final template was the 1939 Joseph Kesserling play “Arsenic & Old Lace” with Boris Karloff (and its 1944 spin-off film with Raymond Massey).

I think the gradual erosion of being easily able to tell this kind of story with contemporary characters can be traced back to how the world changed after the atomic bomb. Before the bomb, the horrors of characters like Dracula, Mr. Hyde and the Wolf Man were considered unimaginable and startling (this was especially true of the early movie audiences who saw such silent movie terrors as Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera and the original Frankenstein – superstitions about such creatures were much more prevalent in those times, often passed on from generation to generation among various people groups). And while such superstitions may have dissipated as the industrial age progressed (it’s unlikely much of the audience for the second wave of Universal Horrors took the films as seriously as those viewing the 1930s Dracula and Frankenstein sagas for the first time), audiences were still willing to spend time in the company of such film fiends.

But after the bomb the classic monsters must have seemed quaint and almost absurd. And I would think that would go double for plots about people going to tremendous efforts to pretend a house is haunted to scare someone out of their inheritance. Not that the atomic bomb didn’t inspire creature features that seem patently absurd to us today. There are scores of giant radiated insect and dinosaur features from the 1950s that we laugh at now. But I think you would have to transport yourself back to those post-Hiroshima days to find that those films weren’t all taken as silly nonsense, but played upon the very real fears of people over the “unknown” – the full effects of the bomb emerging little-by-little. In fact, if you watch the original Japanese version of “Godzilla” (sans Raymond Burr), you realize how sobering and scary “real life” was for folks at the time.

Ultimately, the erosion of the “old dark house comedy” as a viable set-up for a contemporary Hollywood film was furthered by the continual change of the nation’s mood, a loss of innocence if you will facilitated by fears brought on by conflicts with other countries (the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War, Vietnam, etc.), the tensions brought on by social and racial injustices as well as the generation gap fostered by the rise of the counter culture movement, the disillusionment of many in the wake of Watergate, ad infinitum.

In that time, the horror films also became more horrific. It’s interesting to note that there’s an overlap between the “classic horror-comedy” coming to its end (represented by 1966’s “The Ghost & Mr. Chicken”) and the new breed of horror tinged with black comedy (a la Jack Hill’s “Spider Baby” which was filmed in 1964 but not released until 1968). As previously mentioned, "Mr. Chicken" is firmly in the classic tradition even though it includes a couple of edgier shock scenes. But “Spider Baby” is not a “ha ha” kind of funny. “Spider Baby” is psychologically disturbing. It elicits nervous laughter.

After George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead” and the bloody rash of early 1970’s fright flicks like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Last House on the Left” made visceral and often cinema verite-styled scares the norm, it was hard to accept less realistic depictions of terror featuring contemporary characters as plausible. That doesn’t mean such films weren’t made – indeed, there were still some attempts at recapturing the old days from high-profile films like Neil Simon’s “Murder By Death” to quickie programmers like the Don Knotts/Tim Conway “Private Eyes.” They still had more modern touches than the classic horror comedies, but they were indeed throwbacks to those good old dark house days.

The effect of the ‘70s horror films is still being felt to this day. Compare the original William Castle “House on Haunted Hill” to the 1999 remake. The original is a horror movie but has all the old dark house touches, and even some touches of humor here and there, albeit acerbic. The remake eschews the kind of machinations found in classic old dark house films to add vicious demonic creatures and a murder-by-numbers slasher movie approach.

Another result of modern horror sensibilities are the films of Rob Zombie. His “House of 1000 Corpse” and “The Devil’s Rejects” carry on the old dark house tradition of creepy families, but filtered through the influence of “Spider Baby’s” disturbing psychological elements colliding head-on with the relentless hopelessness of ‘70s shockers like “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” What humor there is in these films is splattered in blood, and a long, long way away from Abbott & Costello, the 3 Stooges and the Bowery Boys.

It’s an unfortunate truth, but the pure old dark house horror-comedy is an anachronism. Maybe that’s not too unfortunate – since I consider it a finite entity with a beginning and an end it allows me to write a comprehensive book encompassing its history. BUT…

…that doesn’t mean there are no more pure old dark house horror-comedies. There is one conceit that allows filmmakers to return to the form: parody. One of the premier practitioners of parody, Larry Blamire has graced the world with what looks to be a splendid horror-comedy in the old dark house tradition: “Dark & Stormy Night”. How did he manage to pull it off? By making it look like an authentic horror-comedy from Hollywood’s golden age. The film is shot in black and white and takes place in the 1930s with period costumes and props. And in Larry Blamire’s own words, he’s not afraid to be “absurd” and make films that are not grounded in reality. The film has been playing festivals and is set to tour various cities this March, followed by a July DVD release. I have not seen it yet, but I imagine it will be much-enjoyed by me and many of you who read this blog.

Of course, the vintage setting of “Dark & Stormy Night” only serves to prove my point. Perhaps the only director who could film a spooky old dark house mystery-comedy where the villains try to scare away the heroes, set it in modern times and actually pull it off is Wes Anderson (“Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”). It might all be in the characters’ minds – Anderson’s characters are nothing if not idiosyncratic – but are you going to tell them that their reality isn’t really happening? If a Wes Anderson character tells you he saw what he saw when he saw it, you’d best believe it. Don’t be a doubting Abbott!

Here’s the teaser trailer for “Dark & Stormy Night”:

BE SURE TO RETURN NEXT WEEK WHEN “SPOOKS RUN WILD” ALONGSIDE BELA LUGOSI AND THE EAST SIDE KIDS!

2 comments:

My wife and I saw “Sherlock Holmes” last night at the theater, and even though we both enjoyed it, we did discuss how today’s movies all seem to need to have explcit violence and drawn-out action sequences, which was the case with Sherlock Homes, even though the movie was very interesting and well-done otherwise.

Even more relevant to your article, they showed a trailer for a “Wolf Man” remake that was incredibly loud and manic, and seemed pretty violent. Nothing like the original, which even though that is probably one of my least favorite Universal monster films, it still has the classic formula where a mood is set with great black-and-white images, and the gore, etc. is really only suggested. Similar to the points you make about the horror comedies, I think.

Great thought provoking post Paul! It's very interesting how you compare the creepy dark house motif to those of today. When I wrote my Spider Baby review it was so obvious where Rob Zombie drew all of his inspiration from- despite the fact of course that Sid Haig was in it.

While I think that you are right and that the aspect of comedy in those films is vastly different and even in most cases replaced by blood and gore- I think the House of 1000 Corpses and the Devil's Rejects provided appropriate comedy for the generation exposed to it. Sure intelligent, dark comedy is replaced by vulgar language in most of those cases- but times are a changin' and people's reception of what is humorous is changing as well.

The same is true for The Wolfman as Bob pointed out. Remakes in a lot iof cases are usually made to expose a whole new generation of people to the classics. However this cannot be done by just making the same old movie. People are sadly not going to respond well to a remake of The Wolfman that is black and white, with a wolf in a less than convincing "wolf suit"- can you imagine the upset and revolt?

Just as you point out that the common fears we have as a community change with the decade or even year in some cases-so do the mediums in which we choose to tell those stories and fears. Plus movie studios see money in great special effects and thrilling movies that will draw the masses to the theater.

It is a sad thought but there is comfort in knowing that both classics- and modern takes are readily available. The classics are little pieces of history that remind us of past eras, and past fears. While they are replaced according to the evolution of each of generation, they are still alive!

ARE YOU READY TO BE SCARED SILLY?

This blog is a companion piece to Paul Castiglia's forthcoming book of the same name, all about horror-comedy films like the classic features "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein," the Bowery Boys’ “Master Minds” and Bob Hope's "The Ghost Breakers;" plus short subject spook-spoofs by comedy legends including Laurel & Hardy, the Little Rascals and the 3 Stooges; and such low-budget gems as "Zombies on Broadway" and "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla."

The book will include a foreword by noted film and TV character actor, monster movie memorabilia collector and spook show reenactor Daniel Roebuck.

About Me

Paul Castiglia is a veteran comic book creator, having written and edited several comic books as well as compiling trade paperback collections. He has also written pop culture articles and essays for magazine and book publications, and done research for special projects related to vintage entertainment.

His past forays into horror-comedy include providing a chapter to the book MIDNIGHT MARQUEE ACTOR SERIES: VINCENT PRICE about the comedic horror films that Mr. Price co-starred in with Peter Lorre, and writing the comic book series ARCHIE'S WEIRD MYSTERIES for several years (based on the animated cartoon show of the same name and recently collected in paperback form).

Oh yeah, Paul's dad is the godfather of The Misfits' Jerry Only, further cementing his "horror business" credentials. :)